Family-friendly safaris in Botswana

A very big adventure for all the family on a bush-and-desert safari in southern Africa.

If, like me, you were born in Africa, there is always a yearning to go back for the things only Africa seems to offer. It's why my husband and I go back and back, and why we have always wanted to make sure our children and grandchildren learn to love it as we do. It's why we have established a new rite of passage in our family: when each of our five grandsons turns 10, instead of balloons and party games we take them to a part of Africa that is special to us, and induct them into some of the wonders this great continent has to offer.

This might sound like an easy thing to do, but until fairly recently the under-12s were unwanted in safari- going circles, the thinking presumably being that most safari-goers were the older, children-off-their-hands set who didn't want other people's offspring disturbing their lion stalking or elephant gazing. But things have changed. As Dave Varty, whose family own Londolozi, one of South Africa's most renowned private game reserves, said to me: 'Safaris used to be a child-free zone. Now it would be commercial suicide to leave them out.'

So today children's or family programmes are everywhere, and they're getting more imaginative, more immersive and more engaging by the day. Family suites and private villas are now available in many of Africa's best-known game reserves. The houses even come with their own guides and vehicles, providing the sort of flexibility that has revitalised the whole notion of what a safari in Africa is all about.

When the time came to take Freddie and Ben, our youngest grandsons, to Africa, we had to think long and hard about where best to go. I wanted them to have fun, to have an adventure, as well as to see the wonders that Africa holds, the wildlife and the wilderness. I also wanted them to get to know some of the people of this vast continent and to gain some understanding of the fragility of its ecosystems, and why they need to be preserved.

We started off with the fun. Freddie's elder brother, Alexander, had absolutely loved Ker & Downey's Young Explorers programme at Footsteps Camp in the Shinde Concession in Botswana's Okavango Delta. Paul Moleseng, the guide who Alexander had been so taken by, was still there, running the programme. So it seemed like what my children call a 'no-brainer' to go back to a guide and a place we knew they'd like.

The camp, shaded by sycamore and jackalberry trees, is small (six beds) and designed for families to take over in its entirety; they welcome children of almost any age. It has a nice old-fashioned air, with green canvas tents, bucket showers, a traditional campfire to sit around, and the bonus of flushing loos. It was perfect, nothing too grand - no Frette sheets or petal-strewn baths - just comfortable beds, solar-powered lanterns and delicious food from a bush kitchen.

Paul Moleseng was born and bred in Botswana. He is sophisticated, highly intelligent and, above all, loves the natural world with a passion. He also has a brilliant way with children, joshing and joking, teaching, making it fun but keeping them in order.

Moleseng gave Ben and Freddie the sort of adventure they had been dreaming of ever since Alexander came back with tales of Africa and its marvels. They went tracking and climbed termite mounds. They made bows and arrows, and learned to start a fire with nothing but a few dried leaves, some sticks and stones. He had them driving the Land Rover, learning to punt in a mekoro (traditional canoe), and he set them little shooting competitions using a rifle to down a row of tin cans.

Game isn't hugely plentiful in the Shinde area, but it's a place of surpassing beauty, close to a papyrus-fringed lagoon where hippos live. Nevertheless, we saw almost everything we had come to see, though not a lion or a cheetah. There were zebra and elephants, impala, three wild dogs hiding in the shade of a tree, and almost nightly a giant eagle-owl roosting in the branches. Moleseng taught the boys patience, to respect the bush and all it stands for, but also never to stop being touched by its awesome power. My grandsons adored it all, but soon it was time for another sort of adventure: to explore the Kalahari Desert, something few visitors to Africa ever get to do.

Because my father, the writer Sir Laurens van der Post, helped bring the plight of the Kalahari bushmen to the attention of the world through his books and films, I wanted us to see for ourselves the place they had learned to inhabit so gracefully. I'd only been to the Kalahari once before, and then I'd gone with just a guide and some tents. There were no lodges to stay in. We visited sad and decaying bushmen encampments by day, and camped in the bush by night. I'd loved the desert from the minute I set eyes on it.

It has great wide skies, sometimes filled with scudding cotton-wool clouds, and a big scorching sun that turns the grass a deep gold. Sometimes the landscape is dotted with acacia trees topped with a pale chanting goshawk, and sometimes there seems to be nothing but small scrub bushes and barren-looking pans, which were once huge inland lakes and are now dried and cracked. It is here that the bushmen learned to survive and live in complete harmony with the land and the wildlife around them.

Today, Wilderness Safaris has a wonderful venture, the Kalahari Plains Camp, right in the middle of this strange place. It is staffed mostly by indigenous people, many of them San (as bushmen have come to be called) from the nearest villages, often 70 or so kilometres away. It has brought water, training and employment, and perhaps offers a way into the future for people whose old traditions are fast disappearing and for whom a new way of life isn't yet clear.

Here I wanted the children to see something of what is left of the San culture, for, as my father showed, few people have understood better than the bushmen that only by living in equilibrium with the land will their future be assured. At Kalahari Plains, some of the San staff grew up with these traditions. They still know how to trap birds and hunt eland (the most sought-after of all the game), to tip their arrows in poison and heal themselves with herbs. They take guests on a daily bushmen walk. So in their turn Qaba (Beautiful), Xiee (One) and Xukuri (Blessing) taught Ben and Freddie bushmen lore and games.

They found them roots to chew when they had a headache, showed them how to check whether an ostrich egg has a chick inside, how to cook an ostrich omelette in the sand, and how to soften the skin of the steenbok (antelope) to make a bushmen backpack. The boys learned that a quiver is made from acacia root, a bow from the wood of the brandy bush, arrowheads from porcupine quills or bone, and deadly poison can be obtained from the crabtree. These are people who are straddling two worlds and they seem to be managing it with characteristic bushmen grace: they can mix a mean cocktail and still know how to trap a kori bustard.

Apart from the people, there's the pull of the desert. Kalahari Plains is entirely different from the usual safari lodges in that you don't come just for the animals. Sometimes, when the rains and the stars are right, there are herds of wildebeest, eland, springbok, gemsbok and the like, but mostly the game is sparse.

I wanted the children to see that the African landscape is about more than the great animals, glorious though they are. In the Kalahari you don't see a lot of dramatic stuff. You have to mind about the small, the neglected, the unsung. You learn that there's magic, too, in the dung beetle and the snake, the African hare and the jackal. The children got it, which thrilled me. They saw beyond the heat, the dust, the arid landscape to the desolate beauty of it all. And there, for all that it seemed so stark and barren, we had the most dramatic encounter of our trip.

As we sat at breakfast one morning, the bush scarcely stirring, the horizon apparently empty of game, Freddie ran off to fetch the camera he'd forgotten. At which moment, striding through the camp, right in front of Freddie's room, came a Kalahari lioness on her way to drink and find her cubs. A small boy running to get his camera is perfect lion bait. I screamed, guides ran, dust swirled, but the lioness - fortunately - just strode imperiously, magnificently on. There we learned never to take the bush for granted. Just when you think nothing is happening, it suddenly explodes into action.

I don't think Freddie and Ben will ever forget the desert, and I know they wouldn't have missed it for anything. And if there's a better way of seeing Africa than through the tender eyes of two young boys for whom the whole world is still fresh and thrilling, then I have yet to find it. It was the uplifting, mind-expanding, transformative experience I'd wished for. We had built up memories that I knew would stay with them forever. 'Africa,' said Freddie, so overwhelmed he couldn't quite find the words, 'is so cool.'

As for Ben, he could scarcely get over it all either. 'The animals and the wilderness were the most amazing things I've ever seen in my whole life,' he said. For two British boys, one very urban, one a country child, observing animals as they were meant to be - roaming free, unhindered by mankind - made the sort of impression I'd always hoped it would. They won't forget Africa. They are already plotting to go back.

A seven-day trip to Botswana, staying two nights at the Footsteps Camp and three nights at Kalahari Plains Camp, costs from £3,790 per adult and £2,795 per child under-12, including all meals, safari activities, drinks, laundry, transfers and British Airways flights.